Free Cloud?

What Does Free Mean Exactly?

The Free Cloud Desktop is Free from any charges from Desktop Anywhere, a part of Logical Method Inc. We charge no fees for any component of the Free Cloud Desktop. We certainly charge for other business services that we offer but none are needed for the Free Cloud Desktop. Free from us, but subject to licensing restrictions and limitations from the third parties involved.

The Software used for the Free Cloud Desktop is also completely Free to you for your personal use. The Free Cloud Desktop combines of a lot of terrific Open Source Components and Software mixed with some of our own architecture magic and programming.

We truly want to bring you the best Free Cloud Desktop we can. We do depend on a few outside vendors to power your copy of the Free Cloud Desktop and we have no control over how they do things.

We have also provided some capability for powering your Desktop and integrating services for storage and such. Connecting services like Google Docs, Dropbox and similar components are pretty straightforward Freemium models and you will very likely know it if they are going to start charging you as these services don’t tend to require a Credit Card until you need one.

As you can see, their service is very powerful and enterprise ready so pricing is a little complex. Keep in mind that AWS is an Enterprise class service and has clients like Netflix, the Government and other big spenders. For more information on Free Tier Pricing see the Amazon EC2 Pricing Page.

Our experience has been that you can easily run the Desktop Anywhere Free Cloud Desktop Free of charge using the Free Tier. But this is not necessarily so. Charges can run from a few pennies per day for an unused Elastic IP Address to a substantial charge for doing the wrong thing or too much of the right thing. Amazon AWS is powerful, but it is complex and built to make money. The AWS Free Tier Service can be illuminating and downright addictive, but there is no better overall Cloud Service engine we know of and no better way to quickly get a sense of what AWS can do, especially with respect to a Cloud Desktop, than the Linux based Desktop Anywhere Free Cloud Desktop.

Amazon does have a Billing Alert that you can set at as low as $.01 and get an email notifying you that you are being charged. You can read about the AWS Billing Alert.

You can check your charges manually by logging on to your account and we recommend you do that frequently, at least at first. It really takes someone doing something beyond the Free Tier requirements for your account to be charged. But, it is fairly easy to get charged a little to a lot depending on what you do to go beyond the Free Tier and only know if after the fact. We at Desktop Anywhere cannot control this or even be aware of your account activity. If any of this makes you too uncomfortable, we suggest you not sign up at all.